We humans have come up with a lot of cool stuff. But it doesn’t usually just come out of the blue. For millennia, we’ve been inspired by the natural world to invent, engineer, and improve. This area of engineering is known as biomimicry or biomimetics — quite literally, “copying life.” In this post, I’ll highlight some of my favorite examples of engineering and design inspired by the natural world.

We don’t like thinking about death, with good reason. It’s scary and uncomfortable, but it happens to us all. Nothing lives forever. But the end of one living thing is the beginning of many others, or at least the middle. Heads up that post is on the macabre side. 

Hi again! It’s been a while since my last post - longer than I expected. It turns out that moving to the other side of the planet and starting a new job is a bigger process than I was anticipating. In this post I’ll cover what I’ve been up to for the last 6 months or so. Then I’ll go through my new plan for the Wild Focus Project.

Hi everyone. While I was writing last week’s post about the evolution and physics of bird flight, I came across a really interesting article about a team of engineers modeling a new plane off of albatrosses and their long distance flight abilities. This pulled me into the world of bioengineering. That post, however, is going to have to wait. You see, life, uh… gets in the way. …

Most of us have, at some point, watched birds in the sky and thought something like, “Man, I wish I could fly like that...” I certainly have. But have you thought about why birds fly in the first place? Taking to the sky is a pretty big evolutionary step! …

It’s time for another installment in the Ecosystem Ed. series! In each of these posts, I focus on a different type of ecosystem around the world and break it down to the basics: what, where, why, how, and who, along with some fun facts. This week, we’re focusing on the DEEP OCEAN, one of Earth’s least-understood and inaccessible ecosystems. (Heads up – this post is kind of a long one. I’m just really excited about the deep sea, okay?)

While I was writing last week’s frog blog, I came a cross a particularly interesting amphibian called the dotted humming frog, which is friendly with the burrowing tarantula. They have what’s called a symbiotic relationship. This week, we’ll break down the different types of symbiotic relationships, and look at some fascinating examples of each one.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to attend a talk by Phil Bishop, a professor of Zoology here at the University of Otago. Phil specializes in amphibians, and is one of the world’s foremost advocates for amphibian conservation… This week, it’s all about amphibians: What are amphibians? Why do they matter? Why are they disappearing? And what can we do about it? All of that, plus some cool amphibi-friends, on this week’s frog blog.